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‘I would have loved to charge every adult in that home,’ detective tells Jeffrey Baldwin inquest

Emily Hampshire (right) and Karine Vanasse (left), of the film 'All The Wrong Reasons' poses for a portrait in Toronto, Ontario, September 3, 2013. They star alongside the late Cory Monteith in a film about a manager at a big box store who has an affair with a cashier while his wife struggles with PTSD after watching her sister commit suicide.
Photo: (Tyler Anderson / National Post)

Elva Bottineau must have believed she’d managed to get away with murder.

It was March of 2003. One morning four months earlier, she called 911 to report, in trademark desultory fashion, her five-year-old grandson Jeffrey Baldwin was “apparently not breathing right now.”

In short order, it was discovered the little boy was good and dead — no vital signs, skin cold and mottled — and he was chronically starved.

At the age of almost six, Jeffrey weighed 21 pounds.

Photo of Jeffrey Baldwin at the time of his death from evidence provided by the coroner. The inquest into the murder of Jeffrey Baldwin, whose grandparents beat and starved him to death began Monday, September 9, 2013. Jeffrey weighed less than 10 kilograms and was emaciated when he died of starvation in November 2002.

Undated family photographs show one of his siblings, two full years younger, towering over the poor, sad, hunched little boy.

The horrified first responders all realized something was terribly awry, especially those who had a gander at the unheated, barren, locked-from-the-outside cell-like room where Jeffrey and a sister had been left to fester in their own waste.

Toronto Police were immediately on the case, of course, but it was complicated — by the long involvement of the Catholic Children’s Aid Society (CCAS) in the family’s collective life, by the fact Jeffrey’s three siblings and two young cousins had been seized and placed in foster care, by a change in personnel in the homicide squad.

Former Toronto Police Detective Sergeant Mike Davis, now retired, took over as the homicide officer in charge of the case about two weeks after Jeffrey died.

The first search warrants were executed at the east-end Toronto home where Bottineau and her husband, Norman Kidman, lived with two of their adult daughters and their boyfriends, and the six children on Dec. 23, 2002.

But thereafter, it must have seemed to Bottineau, who is of borderline intelligence but possessed of remarkable cunning and breathtaking chutzpah, nothing much was happening.

She figured she was out of the woods, as it were, and got busy.

The room where “the pigs,” as Jeffrey and his sister had been called by everyone in the house, was cleaned up and painted.

Local Input~ UNDATED — JEFFREY BALDWIN — Photo of Jeffrey Baldwin’s with siblings/family from evidence presented by the coroner on Tuesday, September 10, 2013. The inquest into the murder of Jeffrey Baldwin, whose grandparents beat and starved him to death began Monday, September 9, 2013. Jeffrey weighed less than 10 kilograms and was emaciated when he died of starvation in November 2002.

Where two urine and feces-stained mattresses — so drenched in urine that when a coroner pressed a gloved finger onto one, fluid gushed out — had once served as beds of pain for Jeffrey and his sister, there was now a proper bed, with pillows and warm blankets.

“It was well-furnished and ready to receive (Jeffrey’s siblings) back into the home,” Davis told a coroner’s inquest Tuesday.

And about the same time, he said, Bottineau was back in family court, trying to gain control of Jeffrey’s siblings.

The inquest is probing the circumstances of the little boy’s death, and how he and his three siblings had come to be handed over to Bottineau and Kidman, who were already convicted child abusers, that information buried in the CCAS’s own files.

“There were court proceedings in family court,” Davis told the jurors.

“Elva was attempting to get Sibling 1, 2 and 3 (Jeffrey’s siblings, who can’t be identified) back, out of foster care and back in the home.”

Davis had other plans for the woman who was perhaps the most ungrandmotherly grandma in the country.

She and Kidman were arrested later that month — on March 19, 2003 — and charged with first-degree murder and forcible confinement, the former charge in relation to Jeffrey’s death, the latter to the locking-up of his sister.

Three years later, Ontario Superior Court Judge David Watt, as he then was, convicted them both of second-degree murder and forcible confinement.

They were sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 22 and 20 years respectively, and are now 62 and 61.

“I would have loved to charge every single person — adult — in that home,” Davis told coroner’s counsel Jill Witkin.

But the provincial Child & Family Services Act, while imposing on all citizens the “duty to report” if they suspect a child is suffering, provided for no punishment.

It still doesn’t.

Only professionals such as doctors and nurses, teachers and social workers can be charged under the act, he said, and only they are subject to a fine not exceeding $1,000.

Proposed revisions have never been enacted, Davis said, adding they have “been sitting there for some time.”

As for criminal charges, he said, only those with a duty of care, as it’s called, meaning Bottineau and Kidman, could be charged.

The detective isn’t the only witness who thought the whole venal gang of adults who lived in that house and watched the destruction of that child without lifting a finger to help were responsible in his death.

Osiris Villalobos, the after-hours CCAS worker who handled the call, wept on the witness stand as he remembered the foul “stench” of Jeffrey’s sad room, how the smell of urine was so strong it stayed in his clothes.

The room, he said, “was totally different” from the other bedrooms in the small house, where the favoured youngsters and adults lived in comparative splendour.

The other four adults, he said, “knew what happened to Jeffrey, they were also responsible … Anybody who would have been in that house would have known what was happening,” he told the jurors.

“I would have charged all the people,” he said, wiping his face.

A little later he said, “I shouldn’t say this, but — you get to the point where you wish to take this into your own hands.”

Villalobos had no other involvement in the file, and none whatsoever in the agency’s failure to discover in its own records the criminal convictions for child abuse both Bottineau and Kidman had incurred decades earlier. He is, in fact, very proud, he said, “that I have never left a child at risk.”

Some of his colleagues who are expected to testify later in the inquest will not have that same luxury.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile